I was in a very dark mood yesterday because of the intensity of my pain. Unable to sleep – as I often am – last night I went searching through the WordPress community for interesting things to read. Sometimes I search through the list of blogs I follow in the Reader, while at other times I randomly select a tag to see what others are writing about under different topics. Last night, or early this morning, I chose to search under the tag ‘death’ because I had attached it to yesterday’s post.
What I found wasn’t as morbid or bleak as one might expect. Not that I didn’t find some heartbreaking posts, but I also found inspirational and philosophical writing from many members of the community. One of the posts I read was about an excerpt of a letter from Pier Giorgio Frassati a beatified early twentieth century Italian Catholic social activist. The letter was in response to a friend who had not heard from him for a long while, who wrote to him asking if he was dead. In his response Frassati wrote, “Dead – what does this word mean?”
He then details definitions of death for his friend, and goes on to say, “But if we’re talking about the word in its true essence, then sadly not only am I dead, but already resuscitated a number of times only – alas! to die again.” The post I read this in came from the site Contemplative in the Mud, whose author seemed to have had a bit of a day herself/himself, or at least was introspective about the ups and downs of life. The nice thing for me, after reading this post, was that it opened me up to write some poetry in the early morning hours, which distracted me, at least for a little while, from my pain.
My Small Surrenders 